For the record, the current behaviour is as follows. A package with AllRightsReserved as a license or a missing license is now rejected by “cabal check” with the following: == * The 'license' field is missing or specified as AllRightsReserved. Hackage would reject this package. == A package with an unknown license such as “Foo” is rejected with the following: == * 'license: Foo' is not a recognised license. The known licenses are: GPL, GPL-2, GPL-3, LGPL, LGPL-2.1, LGPL-3, AGPL, AGPL-3, BSD2, BSD3, MIT, MPL-2.0, Apache, Apache-2.0, PublicDomain, AllRightsReserved, OtherLicense Hackage would reject this package. == However, a package with OtherLicense is indeed accepted. It would be good to specify that we ask that OtherLicense indeed be another recognized open-source license. That said, I do not feel strongly about how much care we take to enforce this. We should definitely better document this and other elements of hackage policy, and I know discussions about that have in fact been underway. I agree that being able to filter Hackage packages on license and other considerations (say, build reports on various systems) would be a great feature. Some such improvements have been floated as GSoC projects. I would encourage those that feel strongly about such features to consider getting involved with development of the hackage server. Cheers, Gershom On February 28, 2015 at 4:29:39 PM, Mike Meyer (mwm@mired.org) wrote:
On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Francesco Ariis wrote:
Those restrictions would be, in my opinion, a good idea. Rejecting say CC-SA (CC0 is FSF approved), etc. code means rejecting licences with clear and documented problems in them, problems which would cause quite a lot of headaches down the road.
I don't have a problem if you want to do that. But by disallowing those licenses on Hackage, you've taken away *MY* ability to decide if those problems are problems for my use case.
There are open source projects that are systematically excising GPL'ed software because of the problems it shares with ShareAlike licenses. Should we disallow the GPL because some people have problems with it?
Making Hackage better to help users sort out which licenses they are willing to accept in their project - which I personally would like to do on a project-by-project basis! - is a solution to these problems. Restricting the licenses that are acceptable on Hackage to meet some arbitrary set of criteria is a knee-jerk. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe